Why we treat stakeholders as partners in the research process
By Jenny Zhou & Tiffany Wexler
At Pinterest, we view research as a social discipline. We design studies to intentionally include our cross-functional (XFN) partners, and researchers are always embedded within product teams or serving clear company initiatives. This model differentiates our working style from research agencies or companies with centralized research functions positioned more as consultants or service providers. The embedded approach leads to a shared sense of ownership over learning, advocating for users and applying insights, which yields faster team alignment around product and strategy.
We’d like to share what we’ve learned about sparking a spirit of curiosity, user advocacy and collaboration with cross-functional teams. We’ll explore our methods through three projects that highlight different approaches to engaging our stakeholders in the research process. We’ll break down the process and how we designed for stakeholder engagement and then highlight the benefits of the approach.
Project 1: Weeklong Immersion
Though headquartered in the United States, Pinterest builds a global product, so to get out of our U.S.–centric lens, we conduct field research in psychographically different markets. What better way to develop deep user empathy and to have our stakeholders’ full attention than to bring them into the field with us for five fun-filled days of learning? In 2022, we took four stakeholders with us from San Francisco into the field in Berlin.
What’s special about an immersion? Spending an extended amount of time in a new place inspired our team to pay attention in a whole different way. People can’t help but exercise curiosity when they navigate unfamiliar street signs, menus, traditions and dialects. Living day to day with our stakeholders — beyond the span of interviews — encouraged all parties to broaden their awareness and primed our stakeholders to think about users, their products and our business with fresh perspectives.
The Process
Planning for success
This type of work is an expensive, high effort commitment, so it was essential that we made it worth everyone’s time.
Planning a weeklong immersion is not an approach to be taken lightly. It requires the researchers to hold their usual responsibilities, in addition to putting on the hat of a travel agent. Prior to going in-field, we shared guidelines for traveling to another country (including a packing list, travel tips, visa guidelines, etc.). We also assigned everyone additional roles and responsibilities (photographer, note taker, etc.) to ensure our partners felt a sense of ownership in the research process.
Designing an immersion
We designed a variety of activities to create a multi-sensory immersion that would keep us engaged and connect our research to the broader cultural landscape.
We mixed up the schedule each day: If we weren’t visiting a user’s home for an interview, we were doing a cultural immersion (like a cooking class or a walking tour) or sharing a meal. This helped us approach empathy-building from multiple angles and keep stakeholders engaged — even through jet lag and attention fatigue.
We balanced fun, casual moments with the expected, cerebral ones. To counter sitting through hours of live-translated interviews, we gave stakeholders a chance to ask users some questions of their own. We organized a casual ‘Pinner Dinner’ in a laid-back setting where we could mingle with users and get to know them as people.
Sharing sensemaking with stakeholders
To ensure our stakeholders felt ownership over our collective insights, we designed a rolling sensemaking process integrated throughout our week. To do so, we considered all the ways people might capture, process and synthesize information between digital and physical artifacts, solo and group sessions, synchronously and asynchronously.
During kick-off, everyone received a notes packet with an overview of each interviewee we would meet. This is where stakeholders jotted down quotes and observations during sessions. Immediately after each session, we each silently filled out a short survey form to capture observations while they were still fresh. At the end of each day, we gathered on a shared FigJam that documented key quotes, photographs and themes that emerged across multiple sessions. This became our digital collective brain — a space we would each reference throughout the week to jog our memories and identify new connections.
All these steps culminated in an end-of-week group synthesis session where we identified emerging themes and played around with various frameworks. It was crucial for us to have this final in-field touchpoint before we departed and would be thrust back into our regular work environments.
Co-owning socialization
Back at home, we identified key forums for socializing what we learned and gave the mic to our XFN fieldmates. They relished the opportunity to share back user stories and how they were starting to apply learnings to their work. This was a stand-out moment where our stakeholders truly shined as user advocates. This also generated excitement among our colleagues about the potential of joining an immersion like this in the future.
Benefits of this approach
For the researcher:
- Putting all other work on hold means having your stakeholders’ full attention and participation to co-own activation of the research. This usually means longer shelf life for the learnings.
For the XFN team:
- A weeklong immersion is often a highly memorable “peak experience” for all involved, creating buy-in for the importance of user empathy.
- The sustained quality time together is great for relationship-building, especially for new team members or those who don’t usually cross paths.
- Immersions inspire holistic thinking, going beyond a team’s specific feature or focus area to consider cultural nuances, language barriers and market sentiments.
What was special about the international trip is how immersive it feels to be entirely focused on the research for a week. There’s nothing like hearing straight from Pinners. I’ve never felt more invigorated or connected to ‘putting Pinners first’ than after spending an entire week focused just on understanding our users. This really helped make what we do feel real.
— Product Designer
Project 2: Adopt a Pinner
How do you pique stakeholder engagement with a smaller scale project? My product team had inherited a prototype built by another team that had not conducted user research. We were given eight weeks to launch a minimum viable product, so we were hungry to learn about user perceptions — and needed to do so quickly.
Often, the analysis and synthesis process of research is done by the researcher behind the scenes. At best, this can feel like “magic” to stakeholders; at worst, this feels like a process that takes too long and delays action. In this study, I intentionally designed a stakeholder sensemaking process that would save time by enlisting my team to get intimate with the research data. I designed a diary study followed by a Team Sensemaking Week, where we started with data analysis on a Monday and wrapped up with a team brainstorm on Friday.
The Process
As the diary study data trickled in, this XFN team of product managers, designers, data analysts, engineers, product marketing and product operations were each tasked with “adopting” two users who they would advocate for. It was their job to analyze those users’ diary entry data, extract key needs and pain points and report to the larger group to ensure each user’s needs were represented in our research themes. Here’s what the week looked like:
- On Day 1, each stakeholder signed up for two users they would represent and were given direct access to analyze data from their selected users in our diary study platform, dscout.
- They experienced their users’ journeys by poring through videos, open ends and survey responses from the users’ 10-day feature test. I gave my stakeholders note-taking templates and reflection forms to help them focus their findings. Many usability problems were discovered, discussed over Slack and immediately prioritized into our engineering backlog.
- On Day 2, we gathered as a group to tell the stories of each user. Instead of me — the researcher — playing translator for every user, each team member went to bat for their users’ needs. I took notes while they took center stage, expressing the frustrations and pain points their user experienced. Together, we identified a collective set of user needs and pain points across all the users.
- All this set us up for Day 5, where I shared back our key themes and facilitated a team brainstorm session
By the end of the week, we had a co-created set of user insights, a prioritized list of feature improvements and blue sky explorations for the future. Plus, we had everyone on the team on the same page. A process that would typically take me three weeks to conduct on my own took just one week with a fully engaged group of stakeholders.
But wait a minute … it can be a vulnerable (and risky) thing to give up control; data collection and synthesis are a researcher’s superpowers and play a key role in ensuring research quality.
So I want to be clear on one thing: This was not about democratizing research, but rather about facilitating the learning experience. This demanded a lot more upfront effort to design the process for stakeholders, align on roles and responsibilities and create scaffolds for ensuring research quality. It was a systematic process with many checks along the way. My team did not walk away thinking they were researchers, nor that just anyone could do research. Instead, they left feeling more respectful of the craft of research and appreciative of sharing this experience. Investing time in developing the training and templates gave me the confidence I needed to trust the team and the integrity of our collaborative sensemaking.
Benefits of this approach
For the researcher:
- It allowed me to move faster and skip having to produce a traditional research report. Much of the solo time I would have spent developing a narrative had been replaced with the rich conversations we had as a group through our storytelling process.
For the XFN team:
- People feel like investigators as they sift through raw data. It invites them to marinate in their curiosity just a little bit longer (“am I properly representing this user?”) before rushing to generate a solution. It also empowers them to think about their product, strategies and metrics through the lens of real user problems, which can feel especially motivating and morale-boosting for a team.
- It levels the playing field — whether you’re a senior engineer or a product operations associate, everyone has the same job of sharing the mic to advocate for users, and this helps bond the team.
I saw all these factors at play and how they created a momentum and confidence that my team carried through beyond the scope of just this one project.
This was one of the highest ROI research studies I’ve ever seen. This study felt lightweight; it was totally oriented toward impact, and I think the work-to-impact ratio was enormously high as a result. The long, focused, in-depth reflections and brainstorms were something I felt like had been missing from our previous team workflow and we had been cramming very important, tough questions into 30-minute meetings. Going forward, I’d love to take the pieces of this process that were unique and apply them to other work we do together.
— Product Manager
Project 3: Live Design
As a researcher, partnering closely with a product designer is a real treat because designers often share in our user empathy and concern for the user experience. This partnership is particularly additive in scenarios where we need quick user feedback on new designs.
In a recent project, research interviews were scheduled one week after a design workshop, and one week before a product review with leadership. There was a lot of pressure on the research to stress test our designs and to help the team align our recommended approach to bring to leadership.
The Process
The design workshop generated four different directions around how a brand new feature might fit into our existing core product. The research would need to provide a strong signal from users on the ideal direction that would give this new feature the best chance to succeed in experimentation.
Because we were fresh out of a workshop, the design directions were still messy and hypothetical, with many individual components we wanted to represent in the research stimulus. The designer was nervous about getting the visual articulations just right and making these directions mutually exclusive enough for clear user feedback.
To lift the burden of perfection and to empower us to move quickly, I recommended we go with a Live Design approach. For each user, we would first present the four illustrative directions one at a time and listen closely to their responses. Meanwhile, in the background, our designer would be listening to the user’s feedback and live-creating what she perceived to be each user’s ideal design, borrowing individual aspects from each of the four directions.
She only had roughly 10 minutes to cull this together, so active listening and preparing a kit of parts was essential. This Frankensteined model, personalized for each user, made for a fun “reveal” moment towards the end of the interview. The user felt heard, the designer felt gratified and as the researcher I had a clear visual artifact of the most important feedback from the interview.
Benefits of this approach
For the researcher:
- A warm room of observers for the researcher ensures engagement — the captive audience was excited to listen to the individual model feedback knowing that a Frankenstein was being live-designed
- My design partner was deeply listening versus passively multitasking during the remote interviews
For the XFN team:
- It built respect for the Design craft — stakeholders got to see Design’s superpowers in action and everyone in the audience was excited for the big reveal moment
- My design partner was able to hone intuition and get inspired by new ideas through live iteration
- The whole team was able to efficiently align on a North Star without needing to wait for a formal research deliverable
I really loved the live design! It was a first for me and I appreciated how it forced me to listen and make decisions that fit someone’s needs right on the spot — there was no time to second guess or sweat visual details, I just needed to whip up designs as quickly and as clearly as possible. It was so incredibly rewarding to see participants’ reactions to a visual manifestation of an idea they spoke about moments before. It truly felt like magic to them and you could see how much they enjoyed feeling heard. I felt like a little design genie making their wishes come true!
— Product Designer
The Benefits of Stakeholder Partnership
While the three projects varied in approach and levels of stakeholder commitment, there are several key benefits that they share, including:
- Insights with a longer shelf life: Creating a memorable, collaborative experience solidifies the learnings in people’s minds longer.
- Respect for research craft: Bringing our stakeholders into the research process builds empathy and appreciation for the work we do, much of which is otherwise arranged behind the scenes.
- Alignment on user problems: Having more frequent discussions (and debate) about research as it’s happening helps the team feel confident in the user problems they’ve observed and leads to quicker alignment on potential paths forward to address them.
- Ownership of insights: Assigning people responsibilities inspires them to listen more deeply and feel accountable for shepherding the insights forward. This creates a greater likelihood that the team will take action on our insights, and it lessens the energy typically required by the researcher to socialize research results; instead, the socialization and buy-in happened in real time.
- Research velocity: These approaches take the pressure off the timing and fidelity of the research deliverable for the immediate team. By nature of being closer to the fielding and sensemaking, stakeholders feel confident to move forward and iterate.
While not every study can be planned to maximize stakeholder engagement, we hope these stories give you an idea of why this approach can be worth the effort. Whether your team is expected to deliver on a critical business priority or you’re looking to reorient them around the users they’ve lost sight of, we know from experience that designing research with stakeholder engagement as one of your project objectives can be one of the most effective levers for delivering research impact.
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